Two Hundred and Sixteen Envelopes
As told by Drew Collins, age eighteen
The bank teller’s face changed before she said anything. That was the first signal, the slight pause between pulling up the account and turning the monitor slightly away from me, the professional recalibration of a person preparing to deliver information that is not what the person across from her expects. She was young, maybe a few years older than me, with the careful politeness of someone new enough to the job that difficult conversations still cost her something.
She asked if I had a piece of identification, which I did, and whether I was the account holder of record, which I was, and then she told me the balance in the voice people use when they are saying a number they expect to surprise you. Two hundred and fourteen dollars. I stood at the counter for a moment without saying anything.
The bank was air-conditioned to the particular temperature that banks and grocery stores maintain regardless of the season, and the hum of it filled the space between us while I processed what I had heard. I asked her to say it again. She did, and the number was the same the second time, and I thanked her and walked out through the glass doors into the July heat and sat in my car in the parking lot for a while without starting it.
The account had held $184,200 four months before. I knew this because my grandmother had sent me a letter in March, as she sent me a letter every month, recording the balance and the deposit she had made and a sentence or two about what she hoped I would use it for. I had read that letter sitting on my bed at home and then put it in the shoebox in my closet where I kept all the others, going back eighteen years to the month I was born, the way she had asked me to keep them when I was nine years old and old enough to understand what she was saying without fully understanding why she was saying it.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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